"sort Answers by latest activity first" doesn't work because people are updating the grammar of past archives bumping them up. Is there a way to sort by post creation date for this thread?
– PacerierJan 20 '16 at 7:35

@Pacerier: Yes, hit "Oldest" and scroll down the list. (Accepted answer will always be on top of course.)
– Nathan TuggyApr 14 '16 at 0:37

why does this have 9 answers and not just one?
– user1306322May 30 '17 at 15:58

@user1306322 because in the beginning, there were too many new features, so it passed the 30k character limit. So it was decided to split it per year. Even though in recent years there are way less changes, this tradition is kept.
– Shadow WizardJul 22 '17 at 8:41

1

@Scott good question, but even if we knew, not sure it belongs here as SEDE is "external service". Feel free to start a new support or discussion question asking about those new features. :)
– Shadow WizardJul 22 '17 at 8:42

11 Answers
11

March 2019

Questions cannot appear on the list for more than 72 hours, from the time they are selected.

Each site is limited to contributing up to five concurrent questions to the list.

Logged-in users now have a user preference to hide the Hot Network Questions list network wide. (not on per-site basis at this point)

Stack Exchange employees now have the ability to customize title blacklists on a per-site basis (in addition to a shared network-wide blacklist).

Moderators have the ability to remove a question from the list after it gets selected.

February 2019

2019-02-28: There is now a revision history item when a question is selected for Hot Network Questions. (This only applies to questions that are selected after the change was made; it was not added retroactively to questions selected before the change.)

January 2019

2019-01-28: The user flag summary now has a notice to indicate what flagging means. Additionally, the URL now supports the current parameter, to provide a universal link to one's own flag summary (previously, the URL required the current user's ID).

Re Census -- after? I don't recall seeing an option to choose a site, only whether to claim the badge. Doesn't it depend on which site you entered from?
– Monica Cellio♦Jan 25 at 21:58

2

@MonicaCellio After filling in the survey, you see two buttons: a big blue button to get the badge on Stack Overflow, and a smaller button right beside it to choose a site. If you click on the latter button, you are given a list of sites to choose from.
– Sonic the Wizard WerehogJan 28 at 9:45

Does someone have a source post for the feature change of comment deletion now being done by clicking a "Delete" link rather than an "X" icon? The change was made in the last 12-18 hours for sure.
– TylerHJan 31 at 22:44

October 2011

2011-10-27: The review section now lets you mark posts as reviewed. Doing so allows you to directly take actions on these posts (such as voting, flagging, commenting, …), and hides them from the review section.

2011-07-16: Mobile theme for Stack Exchange sites launched. Users can switch back and forth from the mobile theme using the 'mobile' link at the bottom of every page.

2011-07-15: Anonymous and low rep (<15) users now see a "give feedback" link where logged in users usually see "add comment". When moused over, this shows "Was this post useful to you [yes] [no]". This is just for testing purposes right now - it does not affect the post's score.

2011-07-07: Migrating to another site requires 4 migration votes, instead of a simple 3/5 majority as before. This change applies only to Stack Overflow.

2011-07-06: Close- and reopen- votes now age away on a sliding window: if four days elapse without a close or reopen vote, the votes begin aging away. Posts with fewer than 100 views do not expire votes.

2013-11-07 (or earlier): when calculating the Gravatar email hash for those who do not have a Gravatar account, in some cases now a salt is used.

October 2013

2013-10-08: Deleted answers that have had any spam or offensive flags raised against them will not show the answer body but the following text: "This answer was marked as spam or offensive and is therefore not shown - you can see the revision history for details". Where "the revision history" links to the answer revision history. The vote box (with score) and comments will still appear. (source)

2013-10-07: In user history, Moderators can now see if a user is post-blocked, when, and if they've tried to post since being blocked. (source)

September 2013

2013-09-11: The dialog for flagging posts was redesigned in order to streamline the process. For example, the options for spam and offensive are now listed first. Also, duplicate votes are now separated from close votes.

August 2013

2013-08-12?: It is possible to see one's own deleted recent answers and questions. https://stackoverflow.com/users/recently-deleted-answers/<userID> and https://stackoverflow.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/<userID>. Linked from "answers" and "questions" tag in profile page.

July 2013

2013-07-29: All flags that appear in a user's flagging summary that are not yet dismissed by a moderator have the marking "active" in it. It appears to mean "awaiting attention by a moderator". Source.

2013-07-26: As a counter-measure against robo-reviewing, review ban times now automatically increase based on the amount of previous bans up to a maximum of 30 days.

2013-06-26: Flagging limits changes: You start with 10 flags per day, you can end up with as many as 100 per day. You get an extra flag per day for every 2000 reputation points or 10 net helpful flags (helpful-unhelpful).

April 2013

2013-04-23: Changes to the treatment of deleted content: Deleted questions will be visible to their authors, regardless of those authors' reputation; and delete-voting within two days of closing is disabled on questions scoring -2 or above, regardless of the voter's reputation.

2013-04-22: A new footer is implemented on all sites. It links to a new grid view of all Stack Exchange sites.

2013-04-02: Users are now shown a persistent (but dismissable) banner linking to /about on the site.

March 2013

2013-03-26: The Linked and Related lists on the right sidebar are now displayed with larger text and with the score for each question.

2013-02-18: The revision history of a question that was closed as a duplicate is now showing the chosen originals as part of the "Closed as duplicate" notice.

2013-02-11: If a visitor is not logged in or doesn't have enough reputation to vote, the vote system redirects the vote to the anonymous feedback system, and shows a small blue dialog.

2013-02-06: The auto inserted text for questions closed as duplicates has been changed to "This question already has an answer here:" followed by link to the other question and the number of answers it has. The text is no longer edited into the original question but rather displayed externally. While the question is still open, only the OP sees the message and it becomes visible to everyone once the question gets closed. Questions closed as duplicate prior to this change still have the old "Possible Duplicate:" text in them.

2013-02-01: The "close as duplicate" process has been updated: the interface to search for duplicate questions has been improved, and users may no longer vote to close questions as duplicates of questions that do not have an upvoted or accepted answer

January 2013

2013-01-22: Accept rates will no longer be shown. Like flag weight, they will continue to be calculated for backend use.

2013-01-22: A question closed as a duplicate now gets a " [duplicate]" appended to its title, rather than just " [closed]". It also shows "marked as duplicate" instead of "closed as…" in the post notice.

2013-01-10: First version of the new 'About' page rolled out to act as Quick Start guide for new users. New Bronze "Informed" badge for reading the entire page.

2013-01-04: A new elasticsearch-based search engine has been rolled out across the network. New features include multi-term searches defaulting to AND rather than OR, word stemming, excluded terms -term, infavorites: coming back, ranges for answers: and created: and score:, and more.

November 2012

October 2012

2012-10-19: Review actions limits have been changed: after 20 reviews in a given queue, you're done for the day - if you want to continue reviewing, you can switch to a different queue. Limit is doubled for queues with large backlogs.

2012-10-17: Reopen Votes review queue has been introduced to vote whether or not to reopen closed questions.

2012-10-16: The number of reviews required to accept/reject suggested edits has been increased to two network wide (versus one before) and three on Stack Overflow (versus two before). Moderators can still cast the final vote like before.

September 2012

2012-09-22: Voting allowed (and encouraged) in First Posts and Late Answers review queues.

2012-09-21: New badges added for completing community review tasks. User can earn Custodian (1 review), Reviewer (250 reviews) and Steward (1000 reviews) once for each review queue (Close Posts, First Posts, Late Answers, Suggested Edits and Low Quality Posts). The previous Reviewer badge (for reviewing posts in the old system) will no longer be awarded.

August 2012

2012-08-13: Review audits are introduced: known cases thrown into review queue as "gotchas" to keep people from just nailing "Looks Good" or "Close" or whatever without reading the posts.

July 2012

2012-07-13: The Help Center has been added. It contains pages for many common issues, offering suggestions and a form to email the team as needed. This is the new target of the "contact us" link in the footer, which was previously an email link.

2012-02-27: Reputation changes are kept up to date, without the need for a manual recalc. (Sync takes up to 5 minutes on a delete/undelete action.)

2012-02-22: Automatic question banning calculation has been changed on Meta to better reflect the idea that downvotes can be much more common on meta, for reasons that aren't necessarily related to quality of the post.

2012-01-20: Flag weight was removed from user profiles. Users having flags now see a "helpful flags" count on their own profile linking to the flag audit page, which now contains a breakdown of flag outcomes by flag type (moderator attention, spam, offensive, comment). The Deputy and Marshal badges were modified to require a number of helpful flags (80 and 500, respectively) instead of a specific flag weight.

2012-01-20: "very low quality" flags now carry an automatic downvote from the Community user with them, and are dismissed when the post is edited.

2012-01-16: The populist badge will no longer be awarded for self-answers. Also note that losing your qualification for a already-earned badge will (usually?) no longer result in your next badge of the same type being withheld.

2014-06-10: When moderators or users with the "create new tags" privilege attempt to create one or more new tags either while asking a question or during an edit they are shown a confirmation dialog to reduce risk of tags created by mistake. This feature is enabled on a per-site basis.

May 2014

2014-05-19: Easy close review queue filtering interface - currently enabled only on Stack Overflow, with a threshold 50 for how many outstanding reviews there must be with a tag or close reason in order for it to show up on the dashboard.

October 2015

2015-10-23: It is now possible to filter your flag history by type: "links which can be used to easily see declined, disputed, helpful, etc outcomes of your flags".

2015-10-20: More consistent “Flagged Posts” page: "The stats presented should now be consistent across all flag types, including waiting for review, disputed, declined, aged away, etc."

2015-10-13: Rejected migrations now have an additional notice: "Votes, comments, and answers are locked due to the question being closed here, but it may be eligible for editing and reopening on the site where it originated." Example

2015-10-05: Automatic deletions by Community are now annotated with an indication of reason: one of RemoveMigrationStubs, RemoveDeadQuestions, RemoveAbandonedQuestions, and RemoveAbandonedClosed. Explanation of reasons.

2016-06-14: The Stack Snippets UI has been upgraded. We improved the user experience and UI to: Create visual hierarchy (AKA "easy to use") in the editor and in the snippet inside the post, improve the visual design, and fix some design issues.

2016-04-06: Cross-site posting rate limits apply to new users on every site forcing a waiting period between posting a question or answer after having previously posted one anywhere else on the network.

2016-02-07: Moderators can now redact a revision of a post. (Requires two moderators, one to perform the edit and another one to approve.)

2016-02-01: Post deletion is now included in the heartbeat, and will trigger a popover message indicating that the post has been deleted while you're viewing it. The flag dialog will also prevent you from opening it if the post's state has changed (deleted or closed) since you loaded the page.

May 2011

2011-05-16: Similar Questions are now shown when composing a question, based on the question title, body and tags. This is similar to the “Related” questions in the side bar after posting the question.

2011-05-16: When a bounty is started by the question owner and the owner accepts an answer during the bounty period, the full bounty will be awarded to that answer unless the owner explicitly gives it to another answer before the bounty expires.

2011-05-12: Quality filters are now applied to questions. (Here are two 10K only links.)

2011-05-12: Question downvotes are "free" to the downvoter and will not be subject to a -1 rep penalty. Downvotes to answers are unaffected and still "cost" 1 reputation to cast.

2011-04-14: Daily number of close votes on all Stack Exchange sites have been increased from 12 to 24, and 50 on Stack Overflow.

2011-04-14: Questions closed as “not a real question” and “off topic” get an automatic downvote (excluding questions that get migrated elsewhere).

2011-04-11: Questions with enough answers to push them into CW will have the new answer field replaced by an "Answer This Question" button, which asks the user to read through the existing answers first to make sure the new answer isn't a duplicate.

2011-04-10: Migrated questions now show [migrated] instead of [closed].

2011-04-09: New users (<100 reputation) can no longer answer their own question within 8 hours.

2011-04-08: Votes that were undone (revoked within the undo window) are no longer locked in; one can now come back later to cast a new up/down vote.

2011-04-08: New answerers (<100 reputation) get dynamic help when focusing the answer box.

Feb 2011

2011-02-22: Requirements for achieving the Strunk & White and Copy Editor badges have changed. Now it only counts how many revisions are made, not individual title or body changes. Each requires 80 and 500 revisions respectively.

2011-02-09: Flagging for moderator attention now counts for the Citizen Patrol badge. This change applies retroactively.

2011-02-09: Privilege changes: Create tags has been raised from 150 to 300. Retag has been raised from 200 to 500. A new 5k privilege to approve or reject tag wiki edits has been added. A new 15k privilege to protect a question has been added. The question must be older than a day. You can also un-protect a question you protected, but not one that has been protected by someone else. The requirements for editing a tag wiki have been simplified to a 20k rep privilege.

2011-01-27: Area 51 gets an updated design, proposal categories, and a discussion zone. A51 posts are now oneboxed in chat.

2011-01-27: Stack Exchange now uses Lucene instead of SQL Fulltext for search, related questions, and the 'similar questions' in Ask a Question. Option infavorites is no longer supported, some search keys like intitle have changed names, and a new option body is introduced. See the help on the /search pages.

2011-01-14: Tag pop-ups now lists "Followers" which is equal to the number of people who have favorited (marked as interesting) the tag and the number of email subscribers. Subscribing to RSS is not tracked.

2011-01-13: Flag dialog improved. Its "flag for moderator attention" option now provides several default reasons, where appropriate: "not an answer", "low quality" and "should be CW". It allows for longer messages to a moderator. The daily maximum number of flags has been increased. And if a particular user keeps moderator flagging for reasons that are considered invalid, their flag weight decreases. And for those users who continually flag reliably, their flag weight increases.

2011-01-11: Authors can now only delete their question if it has zero answers, or only one answer with zero score. In all other cases, voting or flagging is required.

2011-01-08: The "flags" tab in 10k tools was improved; it now shows comment flags in addition to spam/offensive flags, and lets users display the entire post and add their own flag directly from the flags tab. It also preserves the other mod tool tabs.

2011-01-08: When hovering over any tag (like this one: stackoverflow) a pop-up will appear. From this you can subscribe to email notifications, add the tag to your RSS reader and view the tag wiki excerpt. Where no tag wiki is available an invitation to create the tag wiki appears. The pop-up also includes links to the FAQ, Info & Top Users pages for the tag.

2011-01-07: Chat "whitelists" no longer allow specified users to talk regardless of their rep. Users with less than 20 rep now get only four hours of chat time before being locked out.

2017-08-04: New footer has been pushed to all sites after several months being in Stack Overflow only. Its main focus is to show links to both Stack Overflow the company and Stack Exchange the network of communities in clear way.

July 2017

2017-07-27: New Email Settings feature has been implemented, allowing better control over what types of emails users get from Stack Exchange.

November 2018

2018-11-01: Support for the Internet Explorer browser has been reduced. Internet Explorer 10 is officially listed as no longer supported, and Internet Explorer 11 support will be discontinued if a new feature is released that cannot be made to work properly with it.

October 2018

2018-10-31: The link insertion and image upload UI have been revamped to show within the editor, rather than as popups; this allows for responsive design.

2018-10-26: As part of the discontinuation of OpenID, stackexchange.com and Area 51 no longer have their own login flow, and their previous login page now redirects to Meta Stack Exchange login.

2018-07-05: Favorite Tags renamed Watched Tags on Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, and Meta Stack Exchange. Will be rolled to all sites at a later date.

2018-07-04: The algorithm for calculating the overall Stack Exchange reputation for Stack Exchange chat was changed to prevent users from simply signing up for 20 Stack Exchange accounts to gain enough rep to chat.

May 2018

2018-05-25?: Everything related to age and birth dates was removed from the system, including the profile field, what users entered into it, as well as the corresponding fields in Stack Exchange Data Explorer, in order to comply with GDPR.

Unknown during May 2018:

Cookie warnings were introduced to SE sites, to comply with GDPR rules.

A new feature was introduced to allow users to download all prediction data collected from them, as well as disable data collection entirely.

April 2018

2018-04-27: The feature to allow <5 rep users to ask on the per-site meta about their own post was enabled on Stack Overflow.

@user13107 it's a joke, right? Just do something and the account won't be deleted. What is the point of keeping an inactive account???
– Shadow WizardJun 2 '18 at 12:49

@ShadowWizard what if people take a 2 year hiatus and return to SO. It can certainly happen.
– user13107Jun 5 '18 at 2:00

@user13107 so they create a new account. Nothing to keep in their old account anyway.
– Shadow WizardJun 5 '18 at 4:10

1

@ShadowWizard Nothing to keep in their old account anyway Is that so, then I think I misunderstood. I wrongly thought that autodeletion will take place if there is no activity for 2 years (even if there is a lot of activity prior to those two years). It seems to me that the correct way to interprete this feature is - if there is no activity in your account (from the start) then it will be auto deleted.
– user13107Jun 5 '18 at 4:38

@Sonic the list here is for new features, not for bug fixes. Feel free to start a new "Recent bug fixes in Stack Exchange", but here such things do not fit.
– Shadow WizardSep 8 '18 at 8:33

1

@Shadow Please read this post's last bullet. The bug report was previously declined, so there is a feature request asking for it to be changed.
– Sonic the Wizard WerehogSep 8 '18 at 17:10

@SonictheInclusiveWerehog: The change in the tag warnings also exists on sites that are still running the old design, e.g., try [critique] on Graphic Design. I therefore assume that it is an independent thing.
– WrzlprmftSep 26 '18 at 16:57

@Wrzlprmft That's still the incorrect formatting for "unknown" dates; see the 2017 answer for the proper formatting.
– Sonic the Wizard WerehogSep 26 '18 at 16:59

@Sonic: I don’t see why it is mandatory to translate the formatting of those events to this case – which is different by nature. In those cases, some way of doing things trickled out, which is naturally fuzzy; here, there is a specific date, which is just unknown. I am pretty confident that the change happened in September (and if somebody knows better or more precise, they can edit to narrow it down – which is most likely going to happen anyway), thus putting it in the actual month is more useful for readers, since it is easier to locate, etc.
– WrzlprmftSep 26 '18 at 18:19

@gnat with all due respect don't you think drawing attention to Sonic and IPS is overkill? Shouldn't this post be concerned with the software that affects every website? Why not wait a week or two and see if IPS is reintroduced in the HNQ?
– Mari-Lou AOct 19 '18 at 10:36

1

@Mari-LouA this list is heavily used to answer questions about how system works and placing change descriptions here serves exactly this purpose, it has nothing to do with bringing attention
– gnatOct 19 '18 at 11:43

@gnat is its exclusion felt net-wide? Does it affect all users? IPS users can refer to their meta if they want answers. The OP says …new features and various changes to Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchangenetwork.…* Not various changes to IPS
– Mari-Lou AOct 19 '18 at 12:05

2

@Mari-LouA yes it did, IPS was among top five sites at HNQ both by clicks and distribution so this change is definitely noticeable network wide (while we're at it, whole HNQ feature is meant to be network wide)
– gnatOct 19 '18 at 12:07

1

@Mari-LouA FYI the second answer on that post gnat linked says that it won't be restored until next year at a minimum.
– Sonic the Wizard WerehogOct 19 '18 at 17:38

2010-12-12: To make the code highlighting work better, it now uses the question tags to guess what language is used in both the question and its answers. When no guess can be made, or on sites on which highlighting makes little sense (Super User, photo.stackexchange.com, ...) no highlighting will be used.

2010-12-11: New badges for posting in Meta sites:
Quorum (bronze) for one post with score of 2 on meta, and Convention (silver) for 10 posts with score of 2 on meta.

2010-12-10: User profiles now display the user's tag statistics (number of questions asked and answers given, along with total question score and total answer score) for each tag on the stats tab. Tooltip gives full details.

Nov 2010

2010-11-24: Mouseover of chat messages now highlights any replies to that message.

2010-11-13: The "activity" tab of the user profile now gives the option to dynamically show the content of recently posted answers.

2010-11-09: Questions are now sorted by "amount of interest" on the homepage rather than time of last activity. (Stack Overflow only.)

2010-11-08: The frequency of the notification envelope lighting up has been toned down in favor of the global inbox.

2010-11-07: Behavior of [tag:tags] on meta sites updated to refer to the parent site by default; new syntax introduced for a meta-site's own tags (source).

2010-11-07: Support for the <kbd> tag re-enabled on Meta Stack Overflow.

2010-11-05: Posting links to the very same site now automatically shows the title. So, just insert https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59445/whatever. to become Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange. The title is not shown in the preview, but inserted when the post is created or edited. The title is not updated when it changes, unless the post is edited. It does not work in comments, nor for links to other SOFU sites. Trailing punctuation marks such as a comma, dot or question mark (without URL parameters) to get a readable sentence work just fine.

Aug 2010

2010-08-17: hot questions formula has been tweaked: Succeeding questions from the same site are penalized by increasing amounts. Community wiki questions are penalized. The benefit of many answers is capped at 10, and we only look at the score of the top 3 answers. We only degrade based on question age, and not the last update date on a question.

2010-08-10: Questions from IP addresses or accounts with a history of extremely poor questions are no longer being accepted. Votes on questions are taken into account, and this yields a permanent IP ban, showing "Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account".

2010-06-19: Complete overhaul of the bounty system. Any user with sufficient reputation can start a bounty on any question. A question may have multiple bounties, though only one active bounty is allowed at any given time. Bounty awards are no longer tied to accepted answer in any way. But the system no longer tosses in +50 bonus reputation to a bounty. (More rules.)

2010-06-13: SEDE, Stack Exchange Data Explorer, which for SO also "can be used as a permanently linkable tool for teaching general SQL and relational database concepts — we can be our own Northwind or Pubs database, when answering questions tagged [sql]". (Since December 2010, its URL is data.stackexchange.com.)

2010-05-10: Replying to @françois and @jørn can nowalso be done using @francois and @jorn.

2010-05-09: Reputation report improved, now you can check rep-cap status from purely upvotes (reached) and upvotes + accepts (exceeded). Note that bounties are not included on any of that. And Epic/Legendary badges calculation based on exceeded.

2010-05-08: Search now supportsinquestion:this to limit the search to the current question (using the referrer as sent by your browser).

Apr 2010

2010-04-30: The vote-undo locked text was changed into a more specific "You last voted on this question / Mar 28 at 7:55 / Your vote is now locked in / unless this question is edited", hence also allowing you to see when you voted if your memory fails you.

Thank you for your interest in this question.
Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).